Monday, November 1, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Global Warming theory up in Flames
Global Warming theory up in flames: Can increased solar activity expected in 2012 actually cool the earth?
October 07, 2010 09:37 PM EDT
views: 289 | 1 person recommends this | comments: 1The theory or Global Warming seems to be going up in flames as reports emerge which state that increased solar storms in 2012 and 2013 will actually coll the earth, not warm it.
The new research, which is based on a three-year snapshot of time between 2004 and 2007, suggests that the earth may cool as sun activity increases. This may prove to be ammunition for Global Warming sceptics.
As solar activity lessened at the end of one of the Sun's 11-year cycles, the new data shows that the amount of energy reaching the Earth at visible wavelengths rose rather than fell. Scientists believe it may also be possible that during the next up-turn of the cycle in 2012, when sun activity increases, there might be a cooling effect at the Earth's surface.
If the new findings apply to long as well as short time periods, this could translate into a small degree of cooling rather than the slight warming effect shown in existing climate models. It would effectively take all of the knowledge we've been told about Global Warming and throw it out the window.
This brings to light the question of whether this whole Global Warming theory is real or fabricated to make money on things like electric cars and solar panels. Obviously, there is a need to conserve and help our planet - which we're pretty much killing slowly - but it seems as though the political talk of Global Warming may be one of the biggest scams of the century. So, who do we believe? The scientists who have done the research or the politicians trying to sell Global Warming as a new way of living in a warmer world?
According to Micheal Lockwood, a space physicist at the University of Reading, "All the evidence is that the vast majority of warming is anthropogenic. It might be that the solar part isn't quite working the way we thought it would, but it is certainly not a seismic rupture of the science."
Hal Lewis says it all about Global Warming SCAM!
0 OCTOBER 2010 | POSTED BY: TOM RICARDO | NO COMMENT
Here is one man from academia the activists will love. Hal Lewis, Professor Emeritus of the American Physical Society (APS) resigned in disgust over the ‘Global Warming Scam’. Lewis gave up his cushy job and stepped forth to reveal how the billions of dollars being pumped into the system had corrupted scientists.Top physicist Hal Lewis said that the climate change scam is the biggest ” pseudoscientific fraud” he has seen in his illustrious career. The global warming brouhaha was to pull the wool over the people’s eyes, a rogue trend that had eaten into the integrity of the American Physical Society. He refered to the ClimateGate documents as proof of the billion dollar dupe, which has also been compiled in Montford’s book on the subject.
In a letter to the American Physical Society published by UK’s Telegraph, Hal Lewis reviles fellow physicists wedded to show me the money research, with lucre being the driving force , as Eisenhower has warned against.
Professor Lewis , in his letter, harks back to the glorious days when he chaired the Reactor Safety Study by the APS and scientists gave an impartial thesis under immense pressure and derision from corporate money-bags. He hailed the unimpeachable scholarly credentials of the erstwhile oversight committee which has eminent physicists like Pief Panofsky, Hans Bethe, and Vicki Weisskopf.
He branded the APS a sell-out ,saying it was a shame to be part of the corruption-ridden institution, and that he was forced to hand in a resignation, given the current situation.
Image Credit: global warming
Science Becoming Religion by Reasonmclucous
Posted by Reasonmclucus October 25, 2010 at 10:41 p.m.Tea Partiers Smarter than Democrats
The dumbest criticism the Democrats' media sheep make of Tea Party members is that Tea Partiers don't accept the global warming nonsense that most Democrats and their media sheep have fallen for.
Most Tea Party members aren't climate experts, but they are smart enough to recognize a political con when they see one. In business cons, police warn that if something sounds too good to be true it probably is. In political cons, if something sounds too bad to be true it probably is too bad to be true.
Like most con artists, the people attempting to continue Enron's global warming scam try to oversell their claims. The global warming scammers are essentially saying that if we don't stop producing the "evil" gas carbon dioxide God will flood the world like he did in the time of Noah.
Supporters of Enron's global warming scam falsely claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) possesses some magical power to increase the temperature of the atmosphere by interacting with low energy infrared radiation (IR).
In the 90's Enron paid scientists and so called environmental groups to claim that an increase in atmospheric CO2 would cause significant temperature changes even though CO2 comprises less than 0.04% of the atmosphere. Enron even wrote the Kyoto Accords for the Clinton administration.
Enron wanted the opportunity to make a fortune by trading what the company called "carbon credits". Enron had previously made a fortune trading sulfur dioxide credits under a program set up to allow northeastern power plants to continue producing the pollution associated with acid rain.
People who are unfamiliar with science don't understand that western science has long been infected with con artists. In the Middle Ages "Alchemists" obtained money from wealthy nobles by claiming to be working on a method of turning a base metal like lead into gold.
Some of the more popular science scams today involve miraculous medical treatments and machines that use little or no energy.
Today's scientists don't trust each other to be truthful. Science journals require "peer review" of articles to discourage writers from publishing phony results that seem to support their theories. Attorneys in court often question whether a scientist witness has been paid to testify a certain way.
Scientists who have trouble getting money for legitimate research may feel they have no choice but to adjust their research and statements to conform to the desires of the businesses or political organizations that offer them money.
Many of the global warming "scientists" who call themselves "climatologists" lack the qualifications for making such claims. The only qualifications most of them have are for predicting short term weather.
Understanding the way climate changes over time requires a background in astrophysics and the operation of earth's complex energy system as well as an understanding of weather patterns.
The Milankovich cycles are the primary factors causing climate. Changes in the earth's tilt on its axis determine how temperatures change from one season to another. Changes in the sun's output affect short term changes in air temperature .
Those familiar with thermodynamics know that physicist R.W. Wood disproved the claim that greenhouses and the atmosphere stayed warm by reflecting IR.
Those who support the claim if global warming don't talk like scientists.
Real scientists don't use terms like "settled science" or "consensus" when talking about their theories. "Consensus" is a political term not a scientific term Scientists don't rely on consensus because the consensus view has been wrong before. In 1895 the consensus among physicists was that atoms were the smallest particles of matter. The consensus was proved wrong when Sir J.J.Thomson reported his discovery of the electron.
Priests suggest their statements represent matters that are "settled". Real scientists qualify their claims and look for additional tests to make to see if they have missed something. Scientists who believe they may have an accurate model of the nucleus of atoms are using the Hadron Collider to determine if they might have missed something.
I learned in high school that when scientists conduct experiments, they should mention conditions that could reduce the accuracy of results. Those who claim global warming ignore the likelihood that the 0.25% change in temperature during the 20th Century might indicates nothing more than the use of different equipment.
Real scientists use mathematically rigorous methods. The people who claim global warming rely on the mathematically meaningless term called "average global temperature".
Priests use terms similar to "denier" and "contrarian" to describe heretics who question their statements. Scientists provide.the results of experiments and observations to refute critics.
Contrary to the statements of President Barack Obama and various energy companies, there is no such thing as clean energy. Large wind generators kill birds and many believe they are visual pollution. The companies that produce solar cells in China are heavy polluters. Using solar energy to heat water to produce electricity requires large amounts of water.
Carbon dioxide is the most essential molecule in the atmosphere. Plants need it to convert solar energy into the bonds that hold complex carbon molecules together. Humans and other animals then use those carbon molecules for food.
Animals than return part of the carbon to the atmosphere as CO2 to be used by plants to complete the carbon cycle. Unfortunately, humans remove large amounts of plant carbon from the cycle by using plant products for items like clothing and paper in which the carbon isn't returned to the atmosphere. Some unused portions of food products are put in landfills instead of the carbon being returned to the atmosphere. We actually need to use fossil fuels to replace the carbon that we remove from the carbon cycle.
I have various posts on this blog exposing flaws in the global warming scam. I also have a Global Warming, Not Blog that primarily only has global warming type posts.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Rivers at a crossroads!
Rivers serving 80pc of world's population under threat | |||
| 2010-09-30 13:50:00 | |||
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| All About: London | |||
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What happens as we run out of oil?
Transition from oil is bound to run into troubled waters
Published on 29 Sep 2010
Oil is filthy stuff.
So much was obvious, even to the purblind, long before the Deepwater Horizon explosion turned the Gulf of Mexico into a noxious sump. Oil stinks to high heaven.
Oil fed through internal combustion engines fouls our air and poisons our children. Oil underpins obnoxious regimes and distorts the global economy. The finding and getting of oil is synonymous with corporate theft. And oil, above all, is warming the planet with consequences guaranteed to dwarf any conceivable benefit.
We should stop using the stuff. Even those who are sceptical of man-made climate change, or content to believe that the catastrophe will be someone else’s problem, can grasp that. The struggle to control a diminishing resource at any cost is a mug’s game. The wars, even if we do not use the word, have already begun.
The oil that was everywhere a century ago is hard to come by now. That was the lesson a car-obsessed America – and the rest of us – refused to grasp when BP’s rig blew in the Gulf of Mexico.
Most of the countries with most of the remaining oil are unreliable at best, unpleasant at worst. The alternatives are, as the industry might say, challenging.
So big oil hunts in places that were once uneconomic. They drill, these days, in the deepest waters, in brutal climates, where nature is wild and almost pristine. They promise to do no harm and they promise, just as BP promised, to manage any risk. Our trust in these endeavours, where it survives, is as remarkable as it is stupid.
But what are we supposed to say? A Coalition Government manned by environmentally-friendly LibDems says we must wean ourselves from fossil fuels. The same Government encourages – or does not discourage – Chevron from exploring the deep waters west of Shetland. The clear intention, as other firms queue for exploration licences, is to extract oil from 1600 metres below the sea’s surface. After Deepwater Horizon, that doesn’t sound too clever.
Environmentalists, busy Greenpeace protesters in the lead, will tell you as much. The frenzied, dangerous search for disappearing oil, they will say, is only making matters worse. An SNP Government confident that Scotland will derive all its energy from renewable sources by 2025 might lead you to believe, meanwhile, that there is no longer a need to gouge the seabed beyond Shetland.
It’s seductive. The world would be a better place without big oil and the petrodollar regimes. Global warming is not a fiction, a scam or a joke. We should be managing the transition from fossil fuels, as greens demand, if only to extinguish the mad conceit of an inexhaustible planet. If we fail, the consequences will be unspeakable.
I agree with every word. I agree until that supreme, petty parochialism common to all but the most dedicated kicks in. I’m sitting in a house whose heating system – not my choice, but expensive to replace – runs on oil. I can’t get from A to B, even with modest intent, without some version of the stuff. My food, your food, and most other things, depend on oil-based transport. So how would “transition” work?
Those who protest professionally on the future’s behalf argue that oil exploration, and hence extraction, must stop now, instantly, before it’s too late. Simple as that. These people are admirable examples of candour, mostly, but they stumble over one question: then what? This is rarely explored.
Alex Salmond, First Minister, is as sincerely supportive of renewable energy as any politician in these islands. As a former oil economist, he grasps the issues, past and present. As a nationalist, and rational, he views the prospect of an energy-independent Scotland – an energy-exporting Scotland, indeed – as a great prize. But he can do his sums where “transition” is concerned.
Mr Salmond, like others, comes up with a figure of £200bn as the required (private) investment needed to secure a renewable future. The First Minister reminds us that big oil conjured an equivalent sum to open up the North Sea’s oil and gas industries. But what obliges those firms to make the effort now, when profits can still be had from the black stuff and when, crucially, few of us possess workable alternatives to our oil-fired lives?
We’re stuck with fossil fuels, for now, in a million common, mundane ways. We were suitably horrified, of course, by the Gulf of Mexico disaster. We understand, some of us, that the need for a little more oil for just a little longer amounts to an excuse, a way to delay the inevitable transition, a guarantee that our lives and our world will be worse off in the long run. But after last winter, snow piled at the door, I won’t be switching off the heating. Sorry.
Renewables are imperfect. It should not be left to the oil lobby and its mouthpieces to say so. Wind farms, on shore or off, have their own environmental consequences and vast financial costs. The energy they supply isn’t cheap and is not, without going into arguments over base loads and the rest, entirely reliable. Solar is beyond the reach of most. Nuclear is troubling, yet probably inevitable.
Greens need to say what they really mean: the transition they have in mind is towards a kind of permanent energy austerity, with all the inequalities implicit in enforced rationing. The perplexed majority should be equally honest: it’s not going to happen. Energy efficiency is rational. But each time I look at a website or a magazine dedicated to environmental activism, I smell the paradox. What, other than passion, fuelled those energy-guzzling efforts? Oil.
If some future well explodes west of Shetland we will all know who to blame. Big oil should never be trusted. But big oil relies on its dependants, its clients, customers and patrons. That would be us, and our governments, each with our needs and necessities.
The choice between transition and catastrophe is too simplistic. There is such a thing, after all, as a catastrophic transition.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Biggest Problem facing Humanity........
Population Growth Is Still The Biggest Problem Facing Humanity
This is a guest post by Gary Peters, a retired geography professor with a long time interest in population issues. Earth’s population is approaching seven billion at the same time that resource limits and environmental degradation are becoming more apparent every day. Rich nations have long assured poor nations that they, too, would one day be rich and that their rates of population growth would decline, but it is no longer clear that this will occur for most of today’s poor nations.
Resource scarcities, especially oil, are likely to limit future economic growth; the demographic transition that has accompanied economic growth in the past may not be possible for many nations today. Nearly 220,000 people are added to the planet every day, further compounding most resource and environmental problems. The United States adds another person every eleven seconds. We can no longer wait for increasing wealth to bring down fertility in remaining high fertility nations; we need policies and incentives to stop growth now.
Much has been written about population growth since the first edition of Malthus's famous essay was published in 1798. However, an underlying truth is usually left unsaid: Population growth on Earth must cease. It makes more sense for humans to bring growth to a halt by adjusting birth rates downward in humane ways rather than waiting for death rates to move upward as the four horsemen reappear. Those who think it inhumane to control human fertility have apparently never experienced conditions in Third World shanty towns, where people struggle just to stay alive for another day.
In 1970 Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on developing new plant strains that formed the basis for the Green Revolution that began in the 1960s. However, in his Nobel acceptance speech Borlaug perceptively commented that "There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort. Fighting alone, they may win temporary skirmishes, but united they can win a decisive and lasting victory to provide food and other amenities of a progressive civilization for the benefit of all mankind." That was four decades ago. During that time the world's population increased by more than three billion and the struggle to feed, clothe, house, and educate ever-growing numbers of people continues. "Temporary skirmishes" seem persistent, if not permanent.
Writers sometimes confuse population issues. For example, in his post, The Population Bomb: Has It Been Defused?,", Fred Pearce wrote that "The population bomb is being defused at a quite remarkable rate." He conflates rates of growth with actual numbers. It is true that the rate of population growth worldwide has declined since 1970. However, the base population has grown by more than three billion; thus we currently add 80 million or more people to the planet each year. That is hardly "defusing" population growth!
Writers may sometimes have short memories when they write about population growth. Fred Pearce's post at "Consumption Dwarfs Population as Main Environmental Threat," is one example. George Monbiot's post on "The Population Myth," is another. Both authors seem to have discovered that our rate of consumption is an issue, so both play down population numbers and focus on our consumption habits. Neither mentions the work of Paul Ehrlich and his I = PAT equation, where I represents our impact on the Earth, P equals population, A equals affluence (hence consumption), and T stands for technology.
Both population and consumption are parts of the problem--neither can be ignored and both are exacerbating the human impact on Earth. More distressing, however, is that many among us don't even see that there are problems created by both growing populations and increasing affluence bearing down on a finite planet. To pretend that another 80 million people added to the planet each year is not a problem because they are all being added to the world’s poor nations makes no sense at all. Many of them will end up in rich nations by migrating, legally or illegally, and all will further compound environmental problems, from strains on oil and other fossil fuel resources to deforestation and higher emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. As Kenneth Boulding noted decades ago, "Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."
Population, consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow until we either face up to the fact that there are limits on our finite Earth or we are confronted by a catastrophe large enough to turn us from our current course. If Chinese, Indians, and others in the poorer world had consumption levels that rose to current western levels it would be like Earth's population suddenly increasing to 72 billion, according to Jared Diamond, who then wrote that, "Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven't met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies--for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy--they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people."
This promise is often made by people who believe that that alone will stop population growth via the demographic transition, conveniently forgetting about such exceptions as China. As Tom Athanasiou argued, in Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor, "In a world torn between affluence and poverty, the crackpot realists tell the poor, who must live from day to day, that all will be well in the long run. Amidst deepening ecological crisis, they rush to embrace small, cosmetic adaptations."
The widespread acceptance and political influence of modern neoclassical economics is a central part of our global problem. In one widely used economics textbook, Principles of Economics, Greg Mankiw wrote that “A large population means more workers to produce goods and services. At the same time, it means more people to consume those goods and services.” Speaking for many neoclassical economists, Tim Harford concluded, in The Logic of Life, that "The more of us there are in the world, living our logical lives, the better our chances of seeing out the next million years." The absurdity of Harford's statement must be recognized and challenged.
Economists do not deserve all the blame. As Thomas Berry noted, in The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, "Western civilization, dominated by a cultural arrogance, could not accept the fact that the human, as every species, is bound by limits in relation to the other members of the Earth community." On his Archdruid blog, John Greer added his observation that "Our culture's mythology of progress envisions the goal of civilization as a utopian state in which poverty, illness, death, and every other aspect of the human predicament has been converted into problems and solved by technology." We don't want to hear about limits.
Nowhere is acceptance of the twin towers of economic growth and increased consumption more apparent than in the United States, where "growing the economy" is still paramount, despite the leftovers of a financial meltdown created by banking and shadow banking systems run amok and a Gulf fouled by gushing oil. As Andrew Bacevich noted, in The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, "For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors." Yet evidence that modern economics has let most people down is abundant.
More than two decades ago Edward Abbey wrote, in One Life at a Time, Please, that "[W]e can see that the religion of endless growth--like any religion based on blind faith rather than reason--is a kind of mania, a form of lunacy, indeed a disease," adding that "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." He expressed his concern about modern economics as follows: "Economics, no matter how econometric it pretends to be, resembles meteorology more than mathematics. A cloudy science of swirling vapors, signifying nothing." Similarly, Nassim Taleb wrote, in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, that "Economics is the most insular of fields; it is the one that quotes least from outside itself!" Gus Speth argued, in The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, that "In the end, what has to be modified is the open-ended commitment to aggregate economic growth--growth that is consuming environmental and social capital, both in short supply." Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, in This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation, that "The economists' odd fixation on growth as a measure of economic well-being puts them in a parallel universe of their own. . .the mantra of growth has deceived us for far too long." Whether in local areas, the United States, or the world, no problem that I can think of will be more easily solved with additional millions of people.
Future oil production will come at an increasing cost, if it comes at all. As Bill McKibbin noted, in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Comunities and the Durable Future, "Cheap and abundant fossil fuel [mainly oil] has shaped the farming system we've come to think of as normal; it's the main reason you can go to the store and get anything you want at any time and for not much money." More expensive oil will eat into world food production, especially if we continue to use foodstuffs to help fill gas tanks.
Scientists need to encourage a deeper and more realistic interest in population growth on a finite planet and its effect on many of the major issues of our time. We ignore the implications of further population growth at our peril. In 1971 Wilbur Zelinsky, in an article entitled "Beyond the Exponentials; The Role of Geography in the Great Transition," fretted that "The problem that shakes our confidence in the perpetuation and enrichment of civilized human existence or even our biological survival is that of growth: the rate, volume, and kinds of growth, and whether they can be controlled in intelligent, purposeful fashion."
Continued population growth is unsustainable, as is continued growth in the production of oil and other fossil fuels. As Lester Brown argued, in PLAN B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, "If we cannot stabilize population and if we cannot stabilize climate, there is not an ecosystem on earth we can save." As Alan Weisman wrote, in The World Without Us, “The intelligent solution [to the problem of population growth] would require the courage and the wisdom to put our knowledge to the test. It would henceforth limit every human female on Earth capable of bearing children to one.” Started now, such a policy would reduce Earth’s population down to around 1.6 billion by 2100, about the same as the world population in 1900. Had we kept Earth’s population at that level we would not be having this conversation.
Discussion Questions
1. Are there things we can do to get the population issue more into public discussion?
2. Are there other approaches to limiting population that might be more salable?
3. If Social Security is not sustainable, having fewer children will increase the likelihood that older adults will have no way of taking care of themselves. How does one deal with this issue?
Let us know what you think or check out the epic discussion at The Oil Drum >>
(This guest post previously appeared at The Oil Drum. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.)
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/population-growth-must-stop-2010-7#ixzz0svtgX6hh
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